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Thursday, October 15, 2009

Painting the Great Big Bulls-Eye

There was a story making the rounds some years back that so many depressed students at Cornell University were jumping to their deaths the members of a fraternity one year painted a large target at the bottom of the campus's favorite site for earthly disembarkation. The Obama administration now seems intent engaging in a similar act of assisted suicide. From Bloomberg:

Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) -- The Pentagon is reviewing the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive military strikes with an eye to modifying or possibly ending it.

The international environment is “more complex” than when President George W. Bush announced the policy in 2002, Kathleen Hicks, the Defense Department’s deputy undersecretary for strategy, said in an interview. “We’d really like to update our use-of-force doctrine to start to take account for that.”

[snip]

James Mann, an author in residence at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said the doctrine “was presented as not just the ‘right’” to strike “before you are about to be attacked, but as an entirely new strategy for dealing with the world.”

“I don’t think the Obama people believe preemption should be defined in this incredibly broad sense -- and I think they feel -- with some reason -- the broad definition really lost American support in the rest of the world,” said Mann, author of “Rise of the Vulcans,” a 2004 history of Bush’s war cabinet.

Isn't that lovely? When our cities are glowing in the dark (regardless the lack of electricity) those who survive will surely bask in the gratitude (in addition to the radiation) Iran, North Korea or whomever gets to us first has for us for being so gosh-darned accommodating; and the rest of the world will love us for it too.